It was not enough, never enough. The ghosts were bottomless in their hunger, and legion. This sense of not-enough had plagued and subliminally influenced me for as long as I can remember. Not-enough was the ultimate mindfuck and midwife because it helped give birth to a slipstream of orphans. Not-enough was the unscratchable itch way down deep in my existence. You cannot scratch where your existence is. Or, how to scratch existence? Existential itches are unscratchable.
I was a young man once with young man’s dreams. I am an older man now, with young man’s dreams. The dreams haven’t changed. I am amazed that I still carry the vision and drive of that young man who imagines he is on a fevered quest, a mission, devoted to a calling. That has not left me. That has not changed. Is the mission somehow bound and wrapped up in not-enough? This insatiable desire to become a great writer, as if one day a specific goal-post will be reached, and ding-ding-ding, I will be coronated Great Writer, status will be officially confirmed, I will be stamped, I will have been inducted into the ranks, and I will let out the largest fire-filled sigh of finally. Having written novels, plays, poems, screenplays … not enough. Never enough. Will Great Writer status be enough? Would success beyond my wildest dreams qualify as enough? Not-enough is tough to swallow and impossible to ignore. It grows and grows. It is the crow cawing nevermore. Nevermore lingers hauntingly in your internal core, it roosts and assumes residence there, and you want to silence nevermore, want to evict it, but it crows on and on, the sibilant whispering of dark flood rising to the mass of tidal.
Not-enough might have been planted in you from a very young age, or from a past life or lives or all of the above, a karmic and compound rotation … not-enough proliferated like weeds and echoes in the sound-garden of your dark. That, or I see a two people, each scrawling a message again and again on their own respective chalkboards: 1. You are not enough, 2. You are enough, and the messages wind up canceling each other out, leaving you sick and tired of you as the subject, you as the host and platform for meditations and musings on enough and not-enough.
If I write about not-enough enough will it be exposed? Will print and exposure settle the matter and rid me of this scourge? I don’t know. I-don’t-know and not-enough have been the two most influential figures in the society of my inner life. Maybe I should get a T-shirt with I Don’t Know printed on the front, and Not Enough on the back. Maybe that would alleviate this need for writing about what I don’t know about not-enough.
